Carl Weiss

For the World War II Navy Cross recipient, USMC, see Carl W. Weiss.

Carl Austin Weiss (December 6, 1906 – September 8, 1935) was a young Baton Rouge, Louisiana physician who allegedly assassinated U.S. Senator Huey Pierce Long, Jr. on September 8, 1935.

Baton Rouge doctor

Weiss was born in Baton Rouge to Carl Adam Weiss and the former Viola Maine. He was educated in local schools and graduated as the valedictorian of Catholic High School . He then obtained his bachelor's degree in 1925 from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He did postgraduate work in Vienna, Austria, and was thereafter awarded internships in Vienna and at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. In 1932, he returned to Baton Rouge to enter private practice with his father. He was president of the Louisiana Medical Society in 1933 and a member of the Kiwanis Club (Conrad 1988, 2:831).

The Pavy-Opelousas connection

In 1933, Weiss married Yvonne Louise Pavy of Opelousas, Louisiana, the seat of St. Landry Parish. The couple had one son, Carl Austin Weiss, Jr. (born 1934). Pavy was the daughter of Judge Benjamin Henry Pavy (1874–1943) and the former Ida Veazie (died 1941). Judge Pavy was part of the anti-Long political faction. Judge Pavy's brother Felix Octave Pavy, Sr. (died 1962), an Opelousas physician, had run for lieutenant governor in 1928 on an intraparty ticket opposite the Long slate. Felix Pavy was defeated for lieutenant governor by Paul N. Cyr of Iberia Parish, who thereafter turned against Long.

Benjamin Pavy was the Sixteenth Judicial District state judge from St. Landry and Evangeline parishes. He did not seek reelection in 1936, after Long had the legislature gerrymander the seat to include a majority of pro-Long voters within a revised district.(Conrad 1988, 2:635). Weiss's father was a prominent eye specialist who had once treated Senator Long.

The shooting

On September 8, 1935, Weiss confronted Huey Long in the Capitol building in Baton Rouge. The precise events that followed are unclear; however, whether Weiss punched Long, shot him, or merely attempted to punch or shoot him, the result was that Long's bodyguards opened fire. Weiss was hit with sixty-two bullets and died at the scene.

Dr. Weiss's sister-in-law, Ida Catherine Pavy Boudreaux (born 1922) of Opelousas recalls that his body was sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for a study of bullets entering and exiting the body. Dr. Weiss was interred in Roselawn Cemetery in Baton Rouge by Rabenhorst Funeral Home. As measured by the number of mourners, Weiss' funeral is believed to be the largest ever held for a suspected political assassin in the United States. Weiss' body was exhumed on October 29, 1991, for forensic evaluation, fifty-six years after the event, and never returned to Roselawn.

Family denials

At the time, Weiss's wife, parents and other family members accepted his guilt, but his parents disagreed because Weiss had seemed to be quite happy earlier in the day.

However, Weiss's son—Carl Weiss, Jr., an infant at the time—has since vigorously disputed the assertion, most recently in an interview on an Unsolved Mysteries program first aired in 1993. Weiss was shot on the spot by Long's bodyguards. The most convincing evidence presented on that program, ostensibly exonerating Dr. Weiss, revolves around the ballistics evidence and the conclusions of the insurance company which issued Huey Long's life insurance policy. Long died from either a .38 caliber or a .45 caliber bullet consistent with the bodyguard's ammunition, while Dr. Weiss actually owned a .32 caliber gun which was not seen by anyone at the scene at the time of the confrontation. Weiss claims without evidence that the insurance investigators concluded that Long's death was "accidental" and that the stray bullet which eventually killed him had been fired carelessly by one of his bodyguards. The fatal shell, fired at relatively close range, was found by the surgeons lodged in Long's body and the conclusion reached on Unsolved Mysteries was that the fatal bullet had either passed through Dr. Weiss's body first or ricocheted off the solid marble walls. In addition, the surgeon's report noted that Long's lip was cut, bleeding and severely bruised, consistent with the punch to Long's mouth attributed to Dr. Weiss by several observers at the scene.

However, the thesis that Huey was shot by one of his own bodyguards was dismissed by Prof. T. Harry Williams as wishful thinking on the part of Dr. Weiss's family and others. In his exhaustive, Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of Long, Williams wrote (p. 870, Vintage edition) that "no one had taken it very seriously, for unless all the witnesses to the event were lying or mistaken, only four shots had been fired while Huey was still in the corridor, the two from Weiss's pistol that struck Huey and Roden's wristwatch respectively and the two from the revolvers of Roden and Coleman that dropped Weiss. By the time the other guards had got their guns out and started to fire Huey had run from the scene."

Notes

• The character of Adam Stanton in Robert Penn Warren's fictitious All the King's Men is partially based on Weiss.
• Carl A. Weiss, III, graduated from Tulane University Medical School in 1993.

References

• Conrad, Glenn R. 1988. A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography. Lafayette: Louisiana Historical Association.
• Richard D. White, Jr., Kingfish (New York: Random House), pp. 258-259.
• Douglas H. Ubelaker, 1997. Taphonomic Applications in Forensic Anthropology. In: Haglund, W.D. & Sorg, M.H. (eds): Forensic Taphonomy: The Postmortem Fate of Human Remains. CRC Press, pp.: 77-90; Boca Raton.
• Williams, T.H., 1969, Huey Long, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

External links

• Louisiana Digital Library Collections Online
• Who Killed the Kingfish?
• C-SPAN program Death of Huey Long